Hydrogen sulfide — the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs — conducts electricity with zero resistance at a record high temperature of 203 kelvin (–70 °C), reports a paper published today in Nature1.
The first results of the work, which represents a historic step towards finding a room-temperature superconductor, were released on the arXiv preprint server in December2 and followed up by more in June3. They have already sparked a wave of excitement within the research community.
A superconductor that works at room-temperature would make everyday electricity generation and transmission vastly more efficient, as well as giving a massive boost to current uses of superconductivity such as the enormous magnets used in medical imaging machines.
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